Arafat’s full name was Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Rauf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini. The nickname, Yasser, means “easygoing,” which seems not entirely apt for a man who told his most credulous biographer, Alan Hart, that he worked “between 18 and 19 hours a day . . . 365 days a year.”16
According to some biographers, he was a distant cousin on his mother’s side of the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, whereas others say it was on his father’s side, or not at all.17 Whatever the exact relationship, most versions agree that during his political maturation Arafat was involved with Husseini and his AHC.18
This is a sensitive question because of al-Husseini’s intimate alliance with Hitler, which has been amply documented despite the disingenuous claim of Arafat’s deputy, Salah Khalaf, known as Abu Iyad, that “anyone who knew him personally, myself included, knew” al-Husseini was no “Nazi sympathizer.”19 But, however much Arafat may have looked up to al-Husseini, there is no evidence he shared the older man’s proclivity for Nazism which was a spent force by the time Arafat came of age.
Rather, Arafat’s own youthful affinity was with the Muslim Brotherhood. His biographers, Andrew Gowers and Tony Walker, write:
Arafat was drawn to the Brotherhood’s militant doctrines of anti-imperialism and national revival through Islam. It remains a moot point whether Arafat was actually a member or merely a sympathizer—he insists now that he was never a member—but he drew heavily on Ikhwan [Brotherhood] support in student elections at King Fouad I University . . . and subsequently in elections for the Palestinian Students’ League.20
Gowers and Walker speculate that the time Arafat spent in an Egyptian jail in 1954 was part of a crackdown on the Brotherhood, which had helped Nasser to reach power but then fell out with him violently.21 And they postulate that the connection between Arafat and the Brotherhood helped to bring support to Fatah from Saudi Arabia relatively early.22 In a like vein, Arafat chose the nom du guerre, Abu Ammar who, he explained, had been “captured, tortured to force him to give up his faith and finally put to death by the infidels. . . . the first martyr of Islam whose name became the symbol of total fidelity to one’s faith and beliefs in the Arab world.”23
Yet, Arafat himself was apparently somewhat casual in observing the rituals of Islam. Arafat’s fawning authorized biographer, Alan Hart, quotes Um Jihad, wife of Arafat’s deputy, Abu Jihad, as explaining that Arafat “always prays in the morning and usually he gathers the fives times a day into one.”24 But, however observant he may have been, Arafat’s connection to his religious roots was important to his success and that of Fatah. Other Palestinian armed groups tended to secularism. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and two of its splinters, the PFLP-General Command and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), were Marxist or Marxist-Leninist. The leaders of the PFLP and the PDFLP and a large share of the members of all three groups were Christians. Two other groups, As-Saiqa and the Arab Liberation Front, were closely tied, respectively, to the strenuously secular Baathist governments of Syria and Iraq. Within Fatah, some of Arafat’s closest collaborators were also Marxists, but other leaders, including Arafat, were not. The genius of Fatah was that its only cause was Palestine. Individual members could lean left or right, but Fatah was a single-issue group. And Arafat’s success as a leader owed much to the fact that he embodied this undeviating focus.
This is not to say that in these early years he or Fatah envisioned a Palestinian state. Rather, its original purpose was simply to build an independent Palestinian fighting organization to spearhead the Arab struggle. The pan-Arabists, they said, who claimed that Arab unity was the route to liberating Palestine had it backward: the liberation of Palestine would pave the way to Arab unity. The exact configuration of Arab rule over the area could be determined once the Zionist interlopers had been expelled.
Fatah’s ambiguity about a Palestinian state was evident as late as 1968 when, having largely taken over the PLO, it reaffirmed the provision of the 1964 Palestinian National Covenant written by Shuqairy that said:
The Palestinian people believe in Arab unity. In order to contribute their share toward the attainment of that objective, however, they must, at the present stage of their struggle, safeguard their Palestinian identity and develop their consciousness of that identity.25
Although the idea of Palestinian statehood still developed only gradually, Arafat’s Fatah was more earnest and effective than Shuqairy’s PLO at fostering a national identity. And Fatah’s philosophy of guerrilla struggle gained salience even with Nasser after the Arabs’ 1967 defeat.
At the Khartoum summit of Arab leaders convened in August 1967 to discuss a response to their military debacle, Shuqairy’s star was in obvious descent. Although the war tarnished all Arab leaders, Shuqairy suffered particular humiliation for having forecasted, with characteristic bombast, that “no Jew will remain alive.” Such statements, it was recognized in the postmortems, had deeply damaged the Arab cause.
“The PLO was not even mentioned in the . . . final communiqué,” at Khartoum, observes the Israeli expert Moshe Shemesh, and “the fidai [guerrilla] organizations became undisputed rulers in the Palestinian arena.”26 They might have simply pushed the PLO aside but, instead, with Nasser’s help, they took it over and made it their own. A few months after Khartoum and a day after meeting with one of Nasser’s aides, Shuqairy submitted his resignation, to be replaced as chairman by Yahya Hamouda, a neutral figure.27 During the course of 1968, Fatah and the other armed groups largely gained control of the various bodies of the PLO, and by 1969 Hamouda gave way to Arafat.
Leaving behind the bombast of Shuqairy as well as the pro-Nazi heritage of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Arafat-led PLO rapidly won a place for itself in the diffuse global revolutionary Left. As early as 1962, Arafat and other top Fatah leaders had visited Algeria, whose successful guerrilla war for independence from France offered a model and inspiration. One of the group, Abu-Jihad (the nom de guerre of Khalil al-Wazir), stayed on to open the PLO’s first foreign office.28
The Algerian example proved to be crucial. The independence movement there had triumphed more in the political plain than the battlefield. Mohammed Yazid, who had served as the new government’s minister of information, shared the lessons with Fatah. Portray the enemy as not only Israel but also “world imperialism,” he counseled, and “present the Palestinian struggle as a struggle for liberation like the others.”29
“The others” meant Communists as well as various movements around the globe professing a less orthodox anti-capitalism or fighting to be free of colonial rule. It would be some years before Moscow would open its arms to Fatah, but the non-European Communists were more receptive. Algeria provided entrée to the most important of these regimes—China, North Vietnam, and Cuba. Arafat and Abu-Jihad visited China in 1964, and the latter went on to North Vietnam.30
Beijing began to provide material aid to Fatah, and the group issued a series of pamphlets titled, The Chinese Experience, The Vietnamese Experience, The Cuban Experience, etc.31 The admiration of the Fatah leaders seems to have been genuine. Abu Iyad relates that on one of several subsequent visits:
I was extremely impressed by the Chinese people’s dedication. They seemed totally devoted to labor—manual or intellectual—and spent their leisure time in simple and healthy activities. Their life-style seemed characterized by a Puritanism worthy of the most fundamentalist Islam. “The Prophet couldn’t have done better than Mao Zedong,” I remarked to Arafat.32
Abu Iyad also found Cuba intoxicating. The “Cuban intelligence” official who greeted him on arrival was a “wonderfully humorous man,” and Fidel was a “veritable force of nature . . . plain-speaking . . . earthy and
